Environmental science, including chemistry and toxicology, is a highly interdisciplinary field incorporating researchers with various backgrounds and expertise such as: environmental chemistry, toxicology, atmospheric sciences, biology, data sciences, health science, plus physical, organic, analytical, and biological chemistry. One key aim of this scientific intersection is to understand the behaviour of chemicals in the environment and the interactions of chemicals with humans and other organisms. This interdisciplinary aspect is critical to addressing issues of chemical pollution, environmental sustainability, and health. However, to be effective in tackling these issues, standardized methods for reporting chemical data must be used. This is becoming increasingly important as reliance on and use of computational analysis methods, and particularly cheminformatic tools, grows. At the same time, the number of chemical structures in databases is growing exponentially. Although there are methods for clearly identifying chemicals, from database specific identifiers to names and structural information, most environmental chemistry and toxicology journals have few or no requirements and expectations for reporting chemical data. Thus, correctly identifying chemicals in literature can pose a significant challenge. This poster will review the different methods available for chemical identification and provide minimum reporting requirements for identification of chemical species using structural information and provide resources on how to access and use this information. The purpose is thus to provide recommendations on how to report chemical data in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) manner within environmental science, chemistry, and toxicology. This will broaden the scope and applicability of environmental research to empower community efforts to tackle issues of chemical pollution and sustainability in a comprehensive manner.

The poster was presented at SETAC Seville 2024. Version 2 corrects an error in the structure for lindane.